The Holy Tear of Vendôme

The story begins around 1033. Geoffroy Martel, count of Vendôme and soon count of Anjou, and his wife Agnès de Bourgogne founded on the Loir a Benedictine abbey dedicated to the Trinity. The legend of the foundation holds that one night, from a window of the castle, the couple saw three shooting stars fall into a spring, in the meadows east of the town. Thierry, the bishop of Chartres who was consulted, read in it a sign from heaven, and the abbey was built on the very site of that spring.

The truth is more earthly. The count’s marriage was held to be irregular, and Geoffroy had taken the title of Vendôme from his nephew: the foundation redeemed the one and marked the other. The first abbot, Renaud, came from Angers; the charter of dedication was signed on 31 May 1040. The abbey soon grew prosperous, its holdings reaching from the Saintonge to Normandy, and its abbots obtained the rare privilege of bearing the title of cardinal.

Of that great whole there remain the Romanesque tower, eighty metres high and a cousin of the one at Chartres, and the flamboyant facade raised by Jehan de Beauce in 1508. It was in this church that the relic would draw, for centuries, the crowds of the kingdom and beyond.

The relic arrived in 1047, given to Geoffroy Martel, who bestowed it on his abbey. A long tradition identified it with a tear wept by Christ before the tomb of Lazarus: an angel was said to have gathered it, then entrusted it to Mary Magdalene, and from hand to hand it reached the Vendômois. It was neither a phial nor a speck of dust, but a transparent crystal spindle in whose heart, it was said, a drop of water trembled.

Around that drop grew one of the greatest pilgrimages of Europe. People came from the whole kingdom, and even from the Low Countries, to pray to the Holy Tear, which was invoked to obtain rain and to give sight back to the blind. The offerings poured in. At the beginning of the thirteenth century abbot Hamelin had a monumental cupboard raised for the relic, a stone shrine worthy of its fame, whose drawing is still kept.

Such a treasure stirred covetousness. In 1413 the treasurer of the abbey, Yves Loiseau, was tried for the theft from the alms box of the Holy Tear, the chest in which the gifts of the pilgrims accumulated. The tear itself remained in its crystal, exposed to the gaze and to the prayers, at the centre of an abbey that the papacy heaped with privileges and that two popes, Urban II and then Paschal II, honoured with their stay.

But a tear of Christ, preserved intact? Already in the Middle Ages the relic had its sceptics. The quarrel broke out in the seventeenth century, when the scholar Jean-Baptiste Thiers published a dissertation that denied the Holy Tear any authenticity. The great Benedictine Jean Mabillon was compelled to defend it, less from conviction than to show his obedience to his order. The Church itself never consecrated the authenticity of the relic.

The Revolution sealed its fate. In 1790 the Benedictines were driven from the abbey. The municipality came to seize the reliquaries in order to melt down the gold and the stones: the metal went to the Mint of Paris, the relics were burned. The crystal spindle, however, was saved by a certain Monsieur Morin, and then passed from hand to hand.

In 1803, at the re-establishment of worship, the tear was entrusted to Bernier, bishop of Orléans, who gave it to cardinal Caprara, the papal legate in France. Sent from Vendôme toward Rome, it was lost along the way and never reappeared. Perhaps, suggests the historian Achille de Rochambeau, that disappearance suited a Church that the relic embarrassed. There remain the abbey, its tower and its facade of lace; there remains the story of a drop of water that, for seven centuries, made the crowds come.